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Apple Spotlights 12 Spatial Computing Games Available on the Vision Pro along with More Than 250 Other Games That Can Be Played on the Device

Source: Apple.

Source: Apple.

Apple announced that its Arcade game subscription service includes a dozen titles designed for spatial computing, along with over 250 total that are playable on the Apple Vision Pro.

Alex Rofman, Apple’s senior director of Apple Arcade, said in a press release that:

This is just the beginning of a new era in gaming, with players being fully immersed in stunning game worlds and interacting with games in their physical environment in amazing new ways. We’re leading the way in offering players unique spatial games on Apple Arcade that are only possible on Apple Vision Pro, and we’re excited to bring even more magical spatial gaming experiences to our customers soon.

Synth Riders. Source: Apple.

Synth Riders. Source: Apple.

The 12 spatial titles available to Apple Arcade subscribers include:

Alto's Odyssey is coming to the Apple Vision Pro. Source: Apple.

Alto’s Odyssey is coming to the Apple Vision Pro. Source: Apple.

Although it’s a short list of spatial titles compared to the entire Arcade catalog, Apple says more are coming soon, including:

I’ve played a little LEGO Builder’s Journey so far and it’s a lot of fun as a spatial experience, and I’ll be digging into more of these titles for a story on the site soon.

Can You Use a Headless MacBook Air with a Vision Pro?→

Luke Miani (who runs a great YouTube channel I’ve been following for a while) has created the sort of beautiful monstrosity I would absolutely consider for my own workflow: he was able to remove a display from an M2 MacBook Air and use the remaining “macOS slab” as a fully functioning computer for the Vision Pro’s Mac Virtual Display mode.

If the sentence above doesn’t make any sense to you, go watch the video first:

The idea of using headless MacBooks has been around for a while, but I was wondering if it’d find new life with the Vision Pro and the ability to virtualize a Mac display or use Universal Control with it. Which is why I’m very glad that Miani tried this first and confirmed that, yes, a headless MacBook Air totally works as a very expensive Vision Pro accessory.

The reason I’m so fascinated by this project is that I find the current keyboard/trackpad setup on the Vision Pro lackluster. If you don’t want to use a Mac in the middle, your best bet is to get an accessory like a Twelve South MagicBridge to hold a Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad together. However, as I shared earlier this week, that accessory’s form factor is not ideal for lap usage:

I’m waiting for two different “trays” that promise a laptop-like configuration, but as I’ve been told by others online, those don’t fix the fact that the desktop Magic Trackpad doesn’t offer the sort of palm rejection features typically found in Mac laptops.

Which brings me back to Miani’s wonderfully weird and amazing experiment: what if the input portion of a Mac laptop could become a more portable and accurate input method for the Vision Pro, with support for Mac Virtual Display when needed? What if a keyboard computer (Apple II says hi) could be used with the Vision Pro or docked at a desk with a Thunderbolt hub and external monitor?

Realistically, Apple should make this kind of accessory and I’m so surprised that their answer for people who want to work solely on a Vision Pro is “buy the keyboard and trackpad from a few years ago that still have a Lightning connector”. I’m not going to do this to my own MacBook Air. But you have no idea how tempted I am to try.

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Juno 1.1 for visionOS Adds the Ability to Open YouTube.com URLs in the App

Opening videos in Juno from the YouTube website.

Opening videos in Juno from the YouTube website.

John covered Juno, Christian Selig’s new YouTube client for visionOS, on MacStories last week, and I’ve been using the app for the past few days as my default way of watching YouTube videos on my Vision Pro. Today, Selig released version 1.1 of Juno with some welcome quality-of-life enhancements such as the ability to choose video quality, faster load times, and support for dropping YouTube links in the app to watch them directly in Juno. You can read more about the changes on Selig’s blog.

The one new feature I want to call out here is the addition of URL schemes which have, once again, come to the rescue to help me navigate the early limitations of a new Apple platform.

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Magic Rays of Light: Usher and The New Look→

This week on Magic Rays of Light, Sigmund and Devon visit post-WWII Paris in style with The New Look, recap Usher’s performance at the Apple Music Super Bowl LVIII Halftime Show, and catch up on all the latest news in the world of Apple TV.

Show Notes

Send us a voice message all week via iMessage or email to [email protected].

Sigmund Judge | Follow Sigmund on X, Mastodon, or Threads

Devon Dundee | Follow Devon on Mastodon or Threads

View our Apple TV release calendar on the web.

Subscribe to our Apple TV release calendar.

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Apple Introduces Two New Personalized Music Stations

Apple Music has added two new personalized stations: Love and Heartbreak. Here’s how Apple describes each:

The Love Station features songs about romantic love, falling in love, feeling amorous, and feelings that these experiences bring. Tailored to each listener’s taste, the Love Station will play songs and artists they know and love along with recommendations. Not exclusively ballads, these love songs are guaranteed to amplify the mood; whether they’ve got that rush of a new crush, or that fully grown long time love. 

The Heartbreak Station features songs about heartbreak, unrequited love, breaking up, or sad love. Having your heart broken is awful. Sometimes during these moments, music is the only thing that can make sense of it all. The Heartbreak Station will play a blend of songs from artists listeners know and recommendations, to help them let it all out.

The introduction of the new stations follows the Discovery station, which debuted last summer. It’s great to see Apple expanding these algorithmically-generated stations based on your listening habits because they’re nice complements to the curated playlists from Apple Music’s editorial team.

Vision Pro App Spotlight: My Favorite Digital Clock Apps for Vision Pro

It's clocks all the way down.

It’s clocks all the way down.

Who would have guessed that the category of visionOS apps I’d obsessively download from the App Store would be…digital clocks?

Hear me out: it’s very easy to lose track of time when using – and especially working with – the Vision Pro. It’s not just that the current time, in the absence of a status bar – is tucked away in Control Center, which requires you to look up and open a separate window; it’s that with this new platform, and with all these new apps, I want to try everything and my brain is reacting to dozens of stimuli every minute. Time flies when I’m wearing the Vision Pro, filling my workspace with windows and juggling multiple tasks, and that’s not even to mention when I’m in an immersive environment.

Which brings me to humankind’s greatest invention: the clock. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could always see a digital representation of the current time as a tiny window somewhere in your workspace? And wouldn’t it be even better if that digital clock had configuration options that, you know, a physical clock on a wall can’t offer?

For the past few days, I’ve been downloading essentially every clock app I could find on the visionOS App Store, and I’ve compiled a list of my favorite options so far.

Let’s dive in.

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Vision Pro App Spotlight: Things for visionOS Is a Familiar, Intuitive Task Management Experience

Things for visionOS, floating in the sky.

Things for visionOS, floating in the sky.

The biggest compliment I can pay to Things for visionOS is that it doesn’t feel like a compromised version of the iPadOS experience at all. In fact, thanks to the spatial nature of multitasking on the Vision Pro, I’d venture to say that Things for visionOS is a better version of the iPad app, at this point second only to its Mac counterpart in terms of functionalities and overall flexibility.

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Apple’s iMessage Service Will Not Be Regulated under the EU’s Digital Markets Act→

The EU has decided that Apple’s iMessage service is not a core platform, meaning that it will not be subject to regulation under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). Jon Porter writing for The Verge:

The decision is the culmination of a five month investigation which the Commission opened when it published its list of 22 regulated services last September. Although it designated Apple’s App Store, Safari browser, and iOS operating system as core platform services, it held off on making a final decision on iMessage until an investigation could be completed. A similar investigation into iPadOS is ongoing.

In the same press release, the European Commission also decided against designating Microsoft’s Edge browser, Bing search engine, and advertising business as core platforms subject to the DMA.

As you may recall from our prior coverage, Apple’s Safari browser, App Store, and iOS are all subject to the DMA, but the EC deferred making a decision on iMessage. In the interim, Apple announced it would support the RCS messaging standard that will exist alongside iMessage in Apple’s Messages app and will include several features that previously were unavailable to non-iPhone users who messaged iPhone users. It’s likely that Apple’s decision to incorporate RCS, which the company says is coming later this year, and iMessage’s relatively small European market share played a role in the EC’s decision, although the reasoning behind the decision was not shared by EU regulators.

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